Statistics proving that communism was not worth millions of dead.

Official Soviet statistics released during glasnost indicate that following seventy years of socialist development 40 percent of the Soviet population and 79 percent of its older citizens live in poverty. Of course, judged by the standards of "exploitative" capitalist systems, the entire Soviet people live in a state of poverty.Thus, the Soviet Union's per capita income is estimated by Soviet economists as about one-seventh that of the United States, more or less on a par with Communist China. In the Soviet Union in 1989, there was rationing of meat and sugar, in peacetime. The rations revealed that the average intake of red meat for a Soviet citizen was half of what it had been for a subject of the czar in 1913. At the same time, a vast supermarket of fruits, vegetables and household goods, available to the most humble inhabitant of a capitalist economy, was permanently out of reach for the people of the socialist state. Indeed, one of the principal demands of a Siberian miners' strike in 1989 was for an item as mundane and basic to a sense of personal well-being as a bar of soap. In a land of expansive virgin forests, there was a toilet paper shortage. In an industrial country with one of the hardest and coldest climates in the world, two-thirds of the households had no hot water, and a third had no running water at all. Not only was the construction of housing notoriously shabby, but space was so scarce, according to the government paper Izvestia, that a typical working-class family of four was forced to live for eight years in a single eight-by-eight-foot room, before marginally better accommodation was available. The housing shortage was so acute that at all times 17 percent of Soviet families had to be physically separated for want of adequate space.After sixty years of socialist industrialization, the Soviet Union's per capita output of nonmilitary goods and services placed it somewhere between fiftieth and sixtieth among the nations of the world. More manufactured goods were exported annually by Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea or Switzerland, while blacks in apartheid South Africa owned more cars per capita than did citizens of the socialist state. The only area of consumption in which the Soviets excelled was the ingestion of hard liquor. In this, they led the world by a wide margin, consuming 17.4 liters of pure alcohol or 43.5 liters of vodka per person per year, which was five times what their forebears had consumed in the days of the czar. At the same time, the average welfare mother in the United States received more income in a month than the average Soviet worker could earn in a year.Nor was the general deprivation confined to private households and individuals. The public sector was equally desolate. In the name of progress, the Soviets had devastated the environment to a degree unknown in other industrial states. More than 70 percent of the Soviet atmosphere was polluted with five times the permissible limit of toxic chemicals, and thousands of square miles of the Soviet land mass was poisoned by radiation. Thirty percent of all Soviet foods contained hazardous pesticides, and 6 million acres of productive farmland were lost to erosion. More than 130 nuclear explosions had been detonated in European Russia for geophysical investigations to create underground pressure in oil and gas fields, or just to move earth for building dams. The Aral Sea, the world's largest inland body of water, was dried up as the result of a misguided plan to irrigate a desert. Soviet industry operated under no controls, and the accidental spillage of oil into the country's ecosystems took place at the rate of nearly a million barrels a day.Even in the traditional areas of socialist concern, the results were catastrophic. Soviet spending on health was the lowest of any developed nation, and basic health conditions were on a level with those in the poorest of Third World countries. Thirty percent of Soviet hospitals had no running water, the training of medical personnel was poor, equipment was primitive and medical supplies scarce. (By way of comparison, U.S. expenditures on medical technology alone were twice as much as the entire Soviet health budget.) The bribery of doctors and nurses to get decent medical attention and even amenities like blankets in Soviet hospitals was not only common, but routine. SO backward was Soviet medical care thirty years after the launching of Sputnik, that 40 percent of the Soviet Union's pharmacological drugs had to be imported, and much of these were lost to spoilage due to primitive and inadequate storage facilities. Bad as these conditions were generally, in the ethnic republics they were even worse. In Turkmenistan, fully two-thirds of the hospitals had no indoor plumbing. In Uzbekistan, 50 percent of the villages were reported to have no running water and 93 percent no sewers. In socialist Tajikistan, according to a report in Izvestia, only 25 to 30 percent of the schoolchildren were found to be healthy. As a result of bad living conditions and inadequate medical care, life expectancy for males throughout the Soviet Union was twelve years less than for males in Japan and nine years less than in the  United States, and less for Soviet males themselves than it had been in 1939.-David Horowitz, The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America's Future (New York, 1998), pp.98-100 via /r/CapitalismVSocialism https://ift.tt/3cWRrRy